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Joe Louis Walker, the 65-year-old Blues Hall of Fame ferocious electric guitarist and fervent vocalist, cites one prime ingredient in his formula for longtime success and his undiminished capacity for delivering knockout performances both on the road and on his latest sizzling CD, "Hornet's Nest." "You've got to show emotion or it doesn't mean a hill of beans" says Walker who's on the road again to promote his 25th album, a tour that includes one stomping, soulful stopover in Connecticut. "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing as Duke Ellington said. People have got to feel the music from the heart and the gut. The brain...

Related "Muddy Waters" Articles

Joe Louis Walker, the 65-year-old Blues Hall of Fame ferocious electric guitarist and fervent vocalist, cites one prime ingredient in his formula for longtime success and his undiminished capacity for delivering knockout performances both on the road...

Record collectors are a special breed, willing to sift through rubbish on the hunt for a rare sonic gem. They are the keepers of arcane knowledge and obscure taxonomies about genres and labels and recording dates. But even among those driven characters,...

Ian McLagan, who as keyboardist for the Small Faces and later the Faces was part of the first generation of British rockers to gain a wide American following, died Wednesday in Austin, Texas. He was 69.
His death, a day after he had a stroke, was...

Here are some of the most notable box sets this year in rock and pop:
Michael Bloomfield, "From His Head to his Heart to his Hands"(Columbia/Legacy, $46): A herculean guitarist from Chicago's suburbs, Bloomfield stood at the leading edge of the...

The South Side Big Band started rehearsing the opening lines of Miles Davis' 1950s composition "Milestones" at one of its regular Monday practice sessions, when conductor Thomas "Tom Tom" Washington felt the ensemble needed an extra...

"That's all we got," said Max Norton, drummer for Benjamin Booker during a sidewalk chat outside Schubas, scene of a blissful sonic crime.
It was the aftermath of a roiling tempest called "Have You Seen My Son," a reading that skirted...

Johnny Winter, an American blues rock guitarist, vocalist and band leader best known for his virtuoso slide-guitar solos and raspy vocals, was found dead in a hotel room outside Zurich, Swiss police said on Thursday. He was 70.
Along...

The Checkerboard Lounge, the South Side club that hosted the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Muddy Waters, is singing the business blues, hurt by its move to a swankier site and the decline of the influence of urban blues music. In the city that calls...

The Great River Road turned 75 years old this year. If you would like to celebrate this scenic highway that winds almost 3,000 miles along the Mississippi River, Wisconsin's portion offers a luscious slice of great rural flavors.
The byway meanders...

It's hard to believe, but Taj Mahal has been around long enough to have a listing — squeezed between Mad River and Mamas and the Papas — in Lillian Roxon's seminal 1969 Rock Encyclopedia. Harder to believe that, every year, his name never comes up among...

Music biopics often seem ubiquitous, but it's not always easy to drum up movies about famous tune-smiths.
Take Don Cheadle's in-the-making movie about the jazz trumpet player and composer Miles Davis, which he's been trying to get started for years. On...

AUSTIN, Texas — As you read this, Austin's South by Southwest festival is over for 2012. The "Welcome SXSW!" signs have been peeled from club facades, movie marquees, hotels and gas stations. The handbills advertising movies, bands and the...

The intersection of DeSoto and State streets here doesn't look like anything special. On the southeast corner of the roads is H Town Custom Wheels. Across DeSoto to the west is Beer & Bud Mart, which faces a Church's Chicken stand. Immediately to...

On Nov. 22, 1981, the Rolling Stones paid tribute to black history at the Checkerboard Lounge on East 43rd Street. In town for concerts at the then-Rosemont Horizon, the famed rock group made a pilgrimage to the South Side, where their musical style and...

Johnny Winter, one of the greatest blues guitarists of all time, is on the road somewhere in Massachusetts, delivering terse answers by phone to a wide range of questions.
What was Muddy Waters like as a bandleader? "He was very strict. If he didn't...

"No one ever seems to go in or out of that building," says Sean Wilentz, pointing out Princeton's Nassau Hall, a campus landmark old enough to have been held by the British during the Revolutionary War.
It's appropriate that this eminent...